Every so often my guilty pleasures really pay off. Remember when I admitted to watching the Kardashians more often than is healthy for a grown woman? Well this time it’s thanks to the flashy, surgery-tastic, drama-fest that is The Real Housewives of Cheshire that I have experienced a moment of enlightenment.

I’m not getting lip fillers or a boob job or a footballer as a husband.

I think in my half term ramblings I mentioned that we moved house over the summer. How beautifully easy that sounds when written down. It really wasn’t. We had a holiday in France booked for the 3rd August, and once all the searches and surveys and all the other paperwork had been sorted, our exchange date was set for 1st August, despite our many pleas for it to be… Continue reading

The children are shattered after eight weeks of school. Year 2 and Year 4 are VERY HARD WORK evidently, and now it’s half term what do we do? Book up every day with activities of course! Since last Friday, The Girl and I have been girly shopping and girly lunching whilst the boy-folk ate everything Pizza Hut had to offer followed by several Star Wars missions on the X-Box, we… Continue reading

I LOVE this quote from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It sums up my daughter perfectly – although now age 7, she is getting to be rather tall, but still only 7 and therefore still officially little, having been a living, breathing person upon this planet for less than a fifth of my own life, and despite the rather scathing comment from a woman recently who declared upon hearing my children’s ages… Continue reading

There was an IG post that caught my eye the other day. It said ‘No Sleep Club’ and ‘Who wants to join?’, followed by a load of emphatic Yeses. But then these yeses were followed by the likes of “It’s been 2 years now” and “Eighteen months in”, and the ever-hopeful “Hang in there, it gets better”.

Really?? Does it? It’s been over seven years since I last slept… Continue reading

The recent allegations against Harvey Weinstein and the #metoo campaign on social media has had me thinking about experiences I had shut away, ideally never to be revisited. Things that happened to me as a child, before I was ever aware of feminism or sexual harassment or sexual assault; things that happened to me as an adult, after I became aware first-hand of what sexual assault was and what feminism… Continue reading

I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while, but it’s difficult to find the right words, and occasionally the right words pop into my head but it tends to be at something-past-insomnia-in-the-morning and just NO to getting out of bed to even scribble with a pen and paper, but then maybe only I think they’re the right words and everyone else will think they’re the wrong words or stupid… Continue reading

Yesterday an odd thing happened. Not a bad odd thing, not an amazingly deliciously strange odd thing either. It wasn’t like a sudden clicking of things falling into place, nor a Eureka! moment of life suddenly making sense, but it was something. Something small and almost insignificant, yet undeniably hugely significant.

This is what happened. Sitting in a warm photography studio waiting for costume changes to be perfected, for… Continue reading

…that I love alone-time so. Or maybe it’s motherhood. Or my mental state. Whatever it is, I really do love a bit of space and time to be myself, by myself. It’s taken me many, many years to realise that this is OK, that my gut-felt hatred dislikes of large groups, of conversing in a group of more than three friends, of having every minute of every day accounted for… Continue reading